I'm not sure what codex helped with for the Lenovo case, if all that was required was open the stick and stick the sdcard into a computer.
It's crazy that Lenovo will still be trusted to build secured hardware after that. It's not even a vulnerability at this point, I'm not sure how this could pass any form of security review, let alone having anyone review the design and approve it. They must have known it was nothing they pretended and still decide to sell it.
So many boxes to tick, and with a company culture that leans towards box ticking and apathy (regulatory checklists without the extra checkbox “is that last checkbox a real checkbox" then you have to talk to the nerd department who's too busy for your stupid questions... Etc. Etc.) What can we expect? I'm disappointed in Lenovo for this, but my own apathy expects no one will be held accountable!
Does anyone actually trust these products? Always seemed like a terrible idea to me. The correct solution is to use free software cryptography on top of these things.
I've been required to use similar products due to government regulations. Personally I never trusted them, and I would have loved to take 15 minutes poking around in them, but it was the government who mandated their use for their data so ultimately it was out of my hands.
Was it probably a IronKey? They had a Homeland Security grant, I've used one then.
To me software had some advantages. Easy backup of the encrypted data without a dependency to the hardware. IIRC this was somehow solved on the IronKey. Not a black box for the user which have to trust.
My main problem with a software solution for me is the entry of the password which I have to do on a probably compromised computer.
The original IronKey (later sold to Kingston) seems to have be cracked.
A team / company called Unciphered managed to break a IronKey in a attempt to offer such a decryption to Stefan Thomas who had 7002 bitcoin on this key.
This was then worth then 235 million dollar (now >500 million), which is of course a VERY strong motivation. [1]
The Lenovo case of course seems not to be bad implemented security but no security at all, especially if they advertise with encryption, which I found on a Asian Lenovo website where still there are still some specs of the key [2].
A good method if you want to damage your reputation.
I like using the Apricorn keypad flash drives. Like this Lenovo, it's doesn't connect until you unlock it. Password entry is via the built-in keypad so no software is necessary. It's also got a small battery so you can unlock it before you plug it which could prevent someone sniffing the USB 5V rail for any noise. Needing an app makes the Ironkey useless for anything that isn't running a normal desktop OS.
Ironically the DOJ isn’t great at this. Infamously they just gave California an encrypted thumb drive with 20,000 names of, allegedly, non-citizens registered to vote.
The password was included on a sticky note in the package.
They work well in high security environments because you can allowlist the vendor and product id of only these hard drives, and you don't have to set up procedures where people HAVE to encrypt their drives before use.
So cost-wise it makes sense.
But for personal use? BitLocker / VeraCrypt all the way.
You can probably implement your own these days. I would use a model to generate a requirement document, then human review, then generate an implementation plan, then human review, then take it to build. Have a different model to a code review and testing. End with human code review and testing.
You could make your own BitLocker conforming to your requirements without relying on or trusting any cloud or corporate entity.
And then turn Mythos onto your code to make sure you don’t have vulnerabilities? That’s a lot of faith in the security of LLM-written code that I wouldn’t have in human-written code.
The overwhelming majority of people who use USB sticks for things are likely aware of security and the concept of encryption. But the idea of being able to use “free software cryptography on top” may as well be a trip to Mars.
Most "normies" I know think that open source cryptography is less secure because it's "open" (if they even know open source cryptography is a thing at all). No amount of trying to explain to them how more eyes on the source code generally equals safer encryption will sway most of them in the slightest.
>The correct solution is to use free software cryptography on top of these things.
If implemented correctly, "hardware" encryption can be more secure than "free software cryptography". The most obvious benefit is protection against brute-attacks, which you can't meaningfully implement with software. Not to mention added protection of biometric authentication as a second factor, compared to typing a password into a possibly untrusted machine.
“Correctly” is a big caveat. Almost no HW implementation is auditable in any way.
My baseline assumption is that even the good commercial products are only secure from a non-determined attacker, not TLAs. Anything safe from TLAs is what’s being sold only to them.
>Anything safe from TLAs is what’s being sold only to them.
I think you're overestimating how much backdoors there are in products vs actual bugs. As we've seen with with recent vulnerability disclosures, there's plenty of bugs that were put there unintentionally.
I didn’t make any mention of backdoors or bugs, intentional or accidental, or the prevalence of either. You aren’t wrong but you addressed a point I never made.
The point was that there are special products, implementations of already known algorithms, sold only to TLAs. They have the code validated to the Moon and back, unlike the commercial products.
If you own an Android device, your disk encryption is most likely provided via a UFS/eMMC hardware component known as the "Inline Cryptographic Engine" (ICE). Reputable device manufacturers validate the ciphertext that these devices write out to storage in a test environment by running the plaintext through a software encryption process using the same encryption keys as the OS provides to the ICE. If the ciphertexts match, then it would be unlikely that the hardware encryption engine isn't doing its job right.
That's not a good faith argument. A general purpose computing device is unavoidable, it's exceedingly difficult to build anything close to it. Encrypted storage is trivial without dedicated hardware, using open, validated software solutions. The CPU that software runs on gets far more scrutiny than the obscure encryption engine on the USB stick.
Even better, if bugs or backdoors are found you don't need to throw out your encrypted stick, just update the software or reencrypt.
You're not gonna remember a AES256 key either (or at least not many of them), not to mention the ergonomics associated with entering a AES256 key. The whole point of security chips like google's titan m2 or apple's secure enclave is to strengthen weak passwords (eg. 6 digit pins) so they offer comparable security to 256 bit keys, without having to enter 256 bit keys.
Which doesn't do shit even if you're using argon with 32 GB memory usage or whatever. NSA is always going to be able to out-compute you. Not to mention you need a difficulty level that's usable for daily use, but the NSA can brute-force at their leisure, possibly decades in the future.
There was a great article around last week about PDFs using randomly generated keys that ended up using non-secure random number generators and the effect was the only unique portion of the key is was 9bits, and obviously forceable. I wouldn’t even describe this between burrito bites activity as “brute”.
The point being “AES” doesn’t mean secure. Secure through the whole implementation means secure. People fuck up crypto all day, calling out a specific cipher doesn’t mean much.
> If implemented correctly, "hardware" encryption can be more secure than "free software cryptography".
Well you can use open-source / free software cryptography to encrypt and decrypt using a secret key which you do not need to remember and which is safely stored behind a secure element.
And there are quite a few people doing just that.
It's immensely more secure than trusting Lenovo or Microsoft or whatever company.
And you can have your secret on the secure element protected by biometric auth too (some do offer just that).
And there are devices like that with a tiny attack surface that accept biometric (like your fingerprint) to unlock the secret.
To get the best of both world you trust the HSM with one thing: the secret, and that's it. And you use open-source software and protocols (like GPG and OpenSSH) with that secret.
These kinds of product are great for disaster recovery. E.g. your day to day use is software encrypted with a key bound to a TPM and stored in a central crypto store that verifies devices state before giving it out etc etc but then what do you do when all that shit breaks? Having the root key material on a hardware encrypted device on a safe is a great way to be able to restore from failures.
You don't necessarily want free software and traditional cryptography for such use cases.
The traditional free software approach to cryptography is "derive the key from a passphrase; require the user to make the passphrase strong; if the passphrase is weak, put the onus on the user."
This works well for HNers, but is terrible for normies. What normal users want is a locked down chip (potentially running open source firmware!), which securely stores something like an AES key protected by a 6-digit pin, which gets erased after 10 unsuccessful attempts and cannot be cloned. This is how TPMs, Apple's secure enclaves and bank and SIM cards work. This kind of design did more to bring full-disk encryption to end users than any free software ever did.
Software is insecure in many scenarios because endpoint security is abysmal. Of course, a USB stick with fingerprint reader cannot be secure but there is no way around hardware-based cryptography with independent key entry if you need real security. Then again, this won't help you if the secrets are transferred to the insecure endpoint anyway.
This should've been submitted link really. It makes original technical-heavy article more approachable and provides the sources. TH/w offers nothing over it, and neither does the reddit discussion.
The name "FU100" makes this seem like it is a joke product, at the customers expense. Interestingly, I haven't been able to find a product listing for this except on chinese websites like Alibaba.
Interesting those those news are quite late, probably because it (and the entire ThinkPlus USB lineup) wasn't available outside CN. The product was first announced 2019, the flaw was found Aug 2025, CVE-2025-13453 was issued early Jan, and Li's presentation was in Mar.
I always said that in-device encryption that you cannot verify is useless and considered those SATA drives with built-in encryption to be useless. Famous HN luminaries disagreed with me.
>I always said that in-device encryption that you cannot verify is useless and considered those SATA drives with built-in encryption to be useless. Famous HN luminaries disagreed with me.
I mean, yeah? Throwing around words like "useless" without context is almost universally unserious and irritating in a security conversation since security is about economics and threat scenarios. I'm aware of the 2019 paper "Self-Encrypting Deception: Weaknesses in the Encryption of Solid State Drives" [0], but not a lot since then on the state of Opal and any other SED mechanisms and real world effects. Even for the drives discussed there, it's not clear it actually affects what much of the population cared about in terms of FDE, which would more be along the lines of "it'd be hard for a random casual person to pop the drive into an enclosure and just mount it and copy everything off, I don't have to use a super long password all the time, and it doesn't cost noticeable speed".
As another practical issue, encryption is not something most people can verify anyway whether they have the code or not. The pure cold data at rest symmetric use-case means that a lot of hot attacks and side channel stuff isn't so important, even so I sure wouldn't trust myself to either write it or verify it. I mean, I guess I could spot some truly dumb-tier backdoor hard coded keys but not anything subtle in terms of weakness, and even then not every single software update. For most people/organizations they're all black boxes based on trust in the manufacturer/developer(s).
I mean, I don't disagree with you that personally I go with software, less from an encryption pov (though it's not nothing) and more from a recovery-if-things-go-fubar pov. I'd agree the incentives are better, and that while many-eyes is not a panacea lower barriers for security researchers to poke around is still better on balance. Perhaps the LLM-era further pushes it that way, and really will make it more practical for more people to check over software solutions.
But still seems like kind of a stretch for you to assert that Apple's (or many others) in-device encryption is "useless"? We've seen some pretty powerful organizations worldwide really want to get at protected data and then fail even when stakes were high.
I feel like there’s a mismatch between what this is designed for and what people are assuming it’s for (plus no doubt hyperbolic marketing). Clearly this was designed to keep your files from your roommate or kid’s prying eyes, and not to keep military secrets or your plans to overthrow the government.
I’m sure it’s just rank incompetence. Someone thought they were making a secure product and they didn’t know how to do that, or how to verify it. They told marketing that they built a super secure system and marketing trusted them and ran with it.
My uncle considers himself a “tech guy” and had an app published years ago that secures your medical information with “military grade” encryption and it was just a ridiculous shit show of incompetence. But he truly believed he was doing something. Sprinkle some AES on it and it’s secure, right?
I wonder if this is because they are more likely to get away with the lies in the Chinese market. Or maybe the Chinese government even encouraged them to make it that way. Certainly the "FU" probably has a different connotation to the Chinese population.
Yeah, searching I only got Chinese pages and copies of this article itself. Tried searching directly too. I have a hard time they pulled it of shelves so fast that the internet already erased it... I'd expect at least "out of stock" pages to remain.
And the article doesn't even have an image of the product as sold.
How much hardware and even software that is supposedly used for encryption is actually backdoored?
We know that Microsoft's bitlocker had at least one backdoor. Lenovo's fingerprint USB also has backdoors.
It seems like only open source solutions actually provide encryption, like LUKS and Veracrypt. Then again, who guarantees that the executables are actually build from the source? Or that the keys aren't somehow sent over to agencies by the operating system?
TLDR, we cannot realistically trust anything in this dictatorship of mass surveillance.
>We know that Microsoft's bitlocker had at least one backdoor
Source? The closest I found was microsoft's key escrow system, but that's hardly a "backdoor" given it's publicly documented, and it's explicitly stated in no uncertain terms when you're setting it up[1]
Look up YellowKey. Specifically crafted NTFS transaction logs would unlock any Bitlocker drive with transparent encryption. Some people believe it was an intentional backdoor, kind of a debated topic.
Which even microsoft admits is basically a LARP from a security point of view. It's better than nothing, but it's not meant to stand up against serious attacks. Even without the yellowkey exploit, it can be bypassed via interposer attacks on the TPM.
The issue with AI-produced text is rarely bad grammar these days (if anything, that's a marker of human-written text now!), but rather stiff-sounding constructions that humans don't actually use. In this case — semicolons are grammatically correct, but very few people actually use them them (same for em-dashes like what I just used, but you can pry them from my cold, dead fingers).
I absolutely use semicolons when writing professionally. They're just basic parts of grammar, and if you want to be taken seriously by some parts of the world (academia, I'm glaring angrily at you), you would use them.
I guess it comes down to expectations? You don't expect formal conventions from a website writer, while I absolutely do.
I find it interesting that it was a flag for AI writing for you. That's going to make me consider my voice in certain situations now.
Didn't expect something this crazy but I will not trust stuff like this until I've seen a teardown. Imagine being the product manager who approved this shit
Just use veracrypt or ecrypt on any memory card. These devices don't deserve the premium they charge for on-device encryption which in this case is not even encyrypted
It's crazy that Lenovo will still be trusted to build secured hardware after that. It's not even a vulnerability at this point, I'm not sure how this could pass any form of security review, let alone having anyone review the design and approve it. They must have known it was nothing they pretended and still decide to sell it.
Lenovo already has an history of backdooring the devices they sell, sometimes in exchange for money. It's insane that anyone trusts them for anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levono#Security_and_privacy_in...
The original IronKey (later sold to Kingston) seems to have be cracked. A team / company called Unciphered managed to break a IronKey in a attempt to offer such a decryption to Stefan Thomas who had 7002 bitcoin on this key. This was then worth then 235 million dollar (now >500 million), which is of course a VERY strong motivation. [1]
The Lenovo case of course seems not to be bad implemented security but no security at all, especially if they advertise with encryption, which I found on a Asian Lenovo website where still there are still some specs of the key [2]. A good method if you want to damage your reputation.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/unciphered-ironkey-password-crac...
[2] https://tk.lenovo.com.cn/product/1003497.html
The password was included on a sticky note in the package.
They work well in high security environments because you can allowlist the vendor and product id of only these hard drives, and you don't have to set up procedures where people HAVE to encrypt their drives before use.
So cost-wise it makes sense.
But for personal use? BitLocker / VeraCrypt all the way.
You could make your own BitLocker conforming to your requirements without relying on or trusting any cloud or corporate entity.
And MS has handed those keys over to law enforcement before.
If implemented correctly, "hardware" encryption can be more secure than "free software cryptography". The most obvious benefit is protection against brute-attacks, which you can't meaningfully implement with software. Not to mention added protection of biometric authentication as a second factor, compared to typing a password into a possibly untrusted machine.
My baseline assumption is that even the good commercial products are only secure from a non-determined attacker, not TLAs. Anything safe from TLAs is what’s being sold only to them.
I think you're overestimating how much backdoors there are in products vs actual bugs. As we've seen with with recent vulnerability disclosures, there's plenty of bugs that were put there unintentionally.
The point was that there are special products, implementations of already known algorithms, sold only to TLAs. They have the code validated to the Moon and back, unlike the commercial products.
The hardware is still a black box and you’ll never know how it behaves in conditions you didn't test against.
Even better, if bugs or backdoors are found you don't need to throw out your encrypted stick, just update the software or reencrypt.
[1]: https://www.megaprocessor.com/index.html
if you have a bad password that's a user issue
Which doesn't do shit even if you're using argon with 32 GB memory usage or whatever. NSA is always going to be able to out-compute you. Not to mention you need a difficulty level that's usable for daily use, but the NSA can brute-force at their leisure, possibly decades in the future.
Did we wake up in a world without key derivation functions to turn passwords/phrases into keys?
There was a great article around last week about PDFs using randomly generated keys that ended up using non-secure random number generators and the effect was the only unique portion of the key is was 9bits, and obviously forceable. I wouldn’t even describe this between burrito bites activity as “brute”.
The point being “AES” doesn’t mean secure. Secure through the whole implementation means secure. People fuck up crypto all day, calling out a specific cipher doesn’t mean much.
Well you can use open-source / free software cryptography to encrypt and decrypt using a secret key which you do not need to remember and which is safely stored behind a secure element.
And there are quite a few people doing just that.
It's immensely more secure than trusting Lenovo or Microsoft or whatever company.
And you can have your secret on the secure element protected by biometric auth too (some do offer just that).
And there are devices like that with a tiny attack surface that accept biometric (like your fingerprint) to unlock the secret.
To get the best of both world you trust the HSM with one thing: the secret, and that's it. And you use open-source software and protocols (like GPG and OpenSSH) with that secret.
The traditional free software approach to cryptography is "derive the key from a passphrase; require the user to make the passphrase strong; if the passphrase is weak, put the onus on the user."
This works well for HNers, but is terrible for normies. What normal users want is a locked down chip (potentially running open source firmware!), which securely stores something like an AES key protected by a 6-digit pin, which gets erased after 10 unsuccessful attempts and cannot be cloned. This is how TPMs, Apple's secure enclaves and bank and SIM cards work. This kind of design did more to bring full-disk encryption to end users than any free software ever did.
(You actually have to go through https://binary.ninja/2026/10/22/breaking-more-encrypted-usb-... first :))
"How did you get the data?"
"It was just an unencrypted SD card inside"
Not very exciting, but I guess just as accurate as reality!
I mean, yeah? Throwing around words like "useless" without context is almost universally unserious and irritating in a security conversation since security is about economics and threat scenarios. I'm aware of the 2019 paper "Self-Encrypting Deception: Weaknesses in the Encryption of Solid State Drives" [0], but not a lot since then on the state of Opal and any other SED mechanisms and real world effects. Even for the drives discussed there, it's not clear it actually affects what much of the population cared about in terms of FDE, which would more be along the lines of "it'd be hard for a random casual person to pop the drive into an enclosure and just mount it and copy everything off, I don't have to use a super long password all the time, and it doesn't cost noticeable speed".
As another practical issue, encryption is not something most people can verify anyway whether they have the code or not. The pure cold data at rest symmetric use-case means that a lot of hot attacks and side channel stuff isn't so important, even so I sure wouldn't trust myself to either write it or verify it. I mean, I guess I could spot some truly dumb-tier backdoor hard coded keys but not anything subtle in terms of weakness, and even then not every single software update. For most people/organizations they're all black boxes based on trust in the manufacturer/developer(s).
I mean, I don't disagree with you that personally I go with software, less from an encryption pov (though it's not nothing) and more from a recovery-if-things-go-fubar pov. I'd agree the incentives are better, and that while many-eyes is not a panacea lower barriers for security researchers to poke around is still better on balance. Perhaps the LLM-era further pushes it that way, and really will make it more practical for more people to check over software solutions.
But still seems like kind of a stretch for you to assert that Apple's (or many others) in-device encryption is "useless"? We've seen some pretty powerful organizations worldwide really want to get at protected data and then fail even when stakes were high.
----
0: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8835339
My uncle considers himself a “tech guy” and had an app published years ago that secures your medical information with “military grade” encryption and it was just a ridiculous shit show of incompetence. But he truly believed he was doing something. Sprinkle some AES on it and it’s secure, right?
More like fraudulent marketing.
Thought was fake branded product at first and just no one bothered to check, but apparently is available in Lenovo CN's store.
And the article doesn't even have an image of the product as sold.
It was
We know that Microsoft's bitlocker had at least one backdoor. Lenovo's fingerprint USB also has backdoors.
It seems like only open source solutions actually provide encryption, like LUKS and Veracrypt. Then again, who guarantees that the executables are actually build from the source? Or that the keys aren't somehow sent over to agencies by the operating system?
TLDR, we cannot realistically trust anything in this dictatorship of mass surveillance.
Source? The closest I found was microsoft's key escrow system, but that's hardly a "backdoor" given it's publicly documented, and it's explicitly stated in no uncertain terms when you're setting it up[1]
[1] https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...
I'm not 100% certain either way.
Which even microsoft admits is basically a LARP from a security point of view. It's better than nothing, but it's not meant to stand up against serious attacks. Even without the yellowkey exploit, it can be bypassed via interposer attacks on the TPM.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/operating...
> The fingerprint only switched the USB connection on; nothing on the card was encrypted.
I guess it comes down to expectations? You don't expect formal conventions from a website writer, while I absolutely do.
I find it interesting that it was a flag for AI writing for you. That's going to make me consider my voice in certain situations now.
What am I missing here?
I have friends who have been locked out of their phone because they put all their trust in the fingerprint reader.